Yale students unable to identify anonymous forum bashers

Two Yale law students who were the target of anonymous online slanders have so …

Two female Yale law students who were the target of vicious (and anonymous) online attacks are having a tough time figuring out who was behind the postings. The women filed suit last June as "Does I and II" in an attempt to unmask "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey," "DRACULA," "Sleazy Z," "hitlerhitlerhitler," and "The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah" (among others), but in a legal filing this week the women's lawyers admitted that they had so far dug up nothing. The lawyers have even resorted to asking the anonymous defendants to turn themselves in, a tactic that has worked about as well as might be expected.

The anonymous posts went up on AutoAdmit.com, a popular laws school site and discussion forum. When the women entered Yale Law a few years back, a series of vindictive threads attacked them with a bizarre range of fabricated charges. These aren't your standard Internet trolls, either; messages advocated punching the women in the gut while pregnant, raping them, and sodomizing them. The women were each accused of having STDs, having done sexual favors to Yale Law faculty or deans, and being lesbians, among other lurid accusations.

AutoAdmit doesn't log IP address, so finding out who was behind the messages has been difficult. After filing suit, the women's lawyers explored a host of different avenues; in a court document filed this week, those strategies were laid out in detail (and were also noticed by a Slashdot poster). The legal team contacted Microsoft, Highbeam Research, the University of North Carolina, ServInt Internet Services, PenTeleData, GoDaddy, and others.

In the strangest requests, the lawyers said that they knew the offending posts had been made just after the poster read a completely unrelated article, and the lawyers wanted Highbeam Research and others to tell them who had accessed those articles in the moments just before the AutoAdmit post was made.

But it was all to no avail. The responses fell into two categories: 1) you need a court order before we'll tell you anything, and 2) we don't keep those logs or don't keep them for that long. Lawyer Steve Mitra admitted to the court that he had struck out so far in unearthing any of the anonymous posters. He even resorted to posting several messages on AutoAdmit.com "requesting that defendants come forward for the purpose of being served with the complaint and conducting a meet and confer." Shockingly, there were no responses.

The whole saga has caused tremendous emotional stress for both women. In a filing this week, one of the women detailed a long history of emotional problems caused by the posts and said that she received an "Incomplete" in two classes and eventually took a leave of absence for all of the fall 2007 semester.

While the women are seeking expedited discovery proceedings and hope to get subpoenas quickly, it may be too late. Several of the companies pointed out that their own policies about data deletion take effect after 60 or 90 days, and that the log files requested simply aren't available. While the comments against the women might not be legally protected, those who made them could find that legal liability doesn't matter once digital fingerprints have been swept up and dumped in the trash.